The game’s interiors are loaded with the genuine anxieties of the design team Photograph: Electronic Artsĭead Space had two sequels, but publisher EA enforced a more action-orientated approach for the second and, especially, the third game. The spaces within the Ishimura teem with anxiety. Dead Space’s art director Ian Milham has said that, while designing the Ishimura, his team discussed their own fears and dreads – narrow doorways, low ceilings, dentist rooms – and fed these into the design aesthetic. In this way, their very real tensions and frustrations fed into their performances. For Alien, Ridley Scott built a vast set filled with small interconnected spaces and effectively trapped his actors within this spaceship simulcrum for long filming periods.

What really works in Dead Space is its incredible sense of place – the endless passageways and unfathomable technology capture a convincingly oppressive atmosphere. Ridley Scott was heavily inspired by his own upbringing amid the dying industries of north-east England when he visualised both Blade Runner and Alien, and Dead Space plays on the same tensions between the wonders of the future and the everyday boredom and dirt of working with heavy machines. These are not the sterile, high-specification interiors envisaged in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Trek these are working spaces and working people – drab, battered, rusty and downbeat. In choosing a lowly engineer – the world-weary Isaac Clarke – as its protagonist, and a mining ship as a location, Dead Space also echoes Ridley Scott’s explorations of class and galactic industrialisation.

Real tensions … Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien (1979).

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